Gender-atypical career choices of young women: Must the role model be female?

The aim of this paper is to analyze the importance of parental role models for gender-atypical career choices of young women. The questions of the study were examined using a standardized survey of youths in vocational schools (N = 1431). The results show that young people's role models are primarily in their own family; most frequently their mother or their father. Overall, young people prefer same-sex role models, but young women have less rigid gender patterns in their choice of role models than male youth, who exclusively favor same-sex role models. With regard to the importance of parental role models in the process of choosing a career, our results show that the probability young women choose a gender-atypical career is highest when either their mother or their father has a typically male or mixed-sex profession.